Wednesday, December 9, 2015

"This Guy Just Raised $25 Million Because He Knows What You Want to Click"

Facebook wants to convince its users that it is the internet and sometimes I think they're succeeding.
Then five people in a week will tell me they have closed their account and I go back to thinking it's just a very successful distraction for teenagers. Pour moi? Who has the time.

From re/code:

Back in the old days, figuring out how to make Popular Web Content
seemed like a tricky and mysterious thing. Now we know better: If you
want to get yourself some Popular Web Content, you just find some
Popular Web Content on someone else’s Web site, and publish it on your
own.

Easy? Well, it’s not hard. But if you want to turn Popular Web
Content into a business, you will want to do it at scale, using
software.

And that’s what Emerson Spartz says he is doing. The CEO of Dose
Media LLC (formerly Spartz Media) says he’s building “the most
technologically-advanced digital media company in the world,” which for
now means he has figured out how to publish lots of Facebook-friendly
content and use it to drive traffic to his Dose.com and OMGFacts.com sites.

Spartz says he’s attracting 50 million visitors a month*, and while
he doesn’t employ a sales team, he says he’s been able to generate real
revenue using ad networks. All of that has allowed him to raise $25
million in a round led by Tribune Media on top of $9.5 million in
earlier funding; Tribune says it will use Spartz’s tech on its own
sites.

There are plenty of other Web publishers who have figured out how to
turn Facebook into a traffic hose, but some of them are embarrassed to
tell you what they’re up to. Not Spartz: The 28-year-old is confident
that his methodical system for finding stuff people want to share with
one another, and improving his odds by writing a better headline or
seeding it with audiences most likely to appreciate it — and automating
as much of the process as possible — is the only logical approach to Web
publishing....MORE